The Taipei City Government was urged yesterday to repair buildings damaged by the 921 Earthquake and to inspect the earthquake-resistance capacity of 576 aging buildings at municipal schools to prevent disasters in Taiwan like those in the recent Sichuan earthquake.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City councilors Lee Yan-hsiu (李彥秀) and Chin Li-fang (秦儷舫) criticized the city government for its failure to rebuild about 70 buildings almost nine years after the devastating Sept. 21 earthquake in 1999, and expressed concern about the safety of several old school buildings in the city.
“Taiwan is located in an earthquake zone, and residents in these damaged buildings live in fear everyday. The city government, however, has been passive about the repair of these buildings,” Lee said yesterday at the Taipei City Council.
Chin also called on the city government to assess the earthquake-resistance of school buildings, as many schools in Sichuan collapsed during the earthquake and caused concern about the quality of school construction.
Chin said that school buildings including Taipei Jianguo High School, Taipei First Girls High School and Ze Hsin Primary School are more than 50 years old and should be repaired or demolished because of safety concerns.
Wu Wen-chi (吳文誌), a division chief at the city’s Education Department, said some of the old buildings in schools were already listed as historical sites or monuments, and said that old buildings were not necessarily dangerous.
Wu said the historical sites at municipal schools were all well taken care of by the city government, and the department put aside a budget of about NT$700 million (US$22 million) each year for schools to maintain or repair their buildings.
Chang Ming-sen (張明森), a division chief at the city’s Building Administration Office said the basic structures of the buildings damaged in the 921 Earthquake had been repaired, but some residents were unwilling to accept reconstruction or demolition of their buildings.
Chang said as the structures of the buildings were damaged by natural disasters, rather than human factors, the city government could not force residents to have the buildings repaired or demolished according to the Construction Law (建築法).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching